matter. Their eyes darted back and forth across my face, not stopping at my eyes, as though checking for danger. It felt like a strange mix of physical clinging and interpersonal distantiation. Many articles in the International University Press’s Psychoanalytic Studies of the Child book series, described these prematurely formed child personality types: the paranoid scouts, the detached as /f children pretending to feel, the desperate to please obsessionals, the charismatically seductive hysterics and the unconscionable psychopaths. Experiments simulating trauma and neglect in young animals also demonstrate acceleration in biobehavioral development. Possibilities, the number of available states, Q, brain entropies as S = log Q, become casualties of traumatic and neglected early life. Like one trick ponies, these abused and abandoned children take up singular patterns of behavior that seem to work and stick to them. One doesn’t anticipate seeing such narrowly fixated personality patterns until late adolescence or adulthood. They appear at ages too young to qualify for the character pathology coding of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV. Yet the labels of adult personality disorder seem inescapable when one sees a four-year- old child trapped in a compulsive hand washing ritual or a panty flashing five-year- old girl with a seductive gait. Four-year-old Alicia rubbed the lumps in my right hip pocket containing caramel candies. Her blue eyes twinkled. Her long blonde hair was in bangs and her lips in a pout. She kept a hand on her hip and tilted her pelvis as she spoke. Listening to children’s stories, she straddled the reader's thigh and rocked. Alicia had a history of sexual abuse in a home that was a hang out for drug dealers. There were rumors that she talked to strange men late at night on the phone. On admission to the Center, she was found to have genital herpes. Both of her parents had been in and out of prison for drug-related crimes. The Center’s sta